Things Fall Apart

This article is about the novel. For other uses, see Things Fall Apart (disambiguation).

First edition cover of Things Fall Apart (1958)

Things Fall Apart is the debut novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. It portrays the life of Okonkwo, a traditional influential leader of the fictional Igbo clan, Umuofia. He is a feared warrior and a local wrestling champion who opposed colonialism and the early Christian missionaries. Upon publication in 1958 by William Heinemann Ltd, the novel gained positive reviews and has been translated into fifty languages.

The novel takes its title from a verse of the poem, "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats. It was part of Achebe's African trilogy; No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God. The Guardian has called the novel, "one of the great novels about the colonial era".

Plot summary

Okonkwo is a famous man in the village of Umuofia. He is a wrestling champion and leader of a clan. He is characterized as a different person from his father Unoka, who had been a debtor unable to support his wife or children, and who preferred playing his flute over conflict. Okonkwo works independently to build his own fame and wealth from a young age, as his father left him with no inheritance. Obsessed with masculinity, and non expression of his emotions if not anger, he often beats his wives and children.

Okonkwo is selected by the elders to be the guardian of Ikemefuna, a boy taken as a peace settlement between Umuofia and another clan after Ikemefuna's father killed a woman from Umuofia. The boy looks up to Okonkwo as his second father. The Oracle of Umuofia eventually pronounces that the boy must be killed. Ezeudu, the oldest man in the village, warns Okonkwo not to associate himself with the murder but he disregards the warning and proceeds with the killing. After the death of Ikemefuna, Okonkwo feels depressed and had occasional nightmares. During a gun salute at Ezeudu's funeral, Okonkwo's gun accidentally explodes and kills Ezeudu's son. He and his family are exiled to Mbanta, his motherland, for seven years in order to appease the gods.

While Okonkwo is in Mbanta, he learns that the white men are living in Umuofia with the intent of introducing their religion, Christianity. As the number of converts increases, the foothold of the white people grows and a new government is introduced. The village is forced to respond with either appeasement or resistance to the imposition of the white people's nascent society. Okonkwo's son Nwoye becomes curious about the missionaries, and after he is beaten by his father for the last time, he decides to leave his family behind to live independently. Nwoke is introduced to the new religion by a missionary, Mr. Brown. In the last year of his exile, Okonkwo instructs his best friend Obierika to sell all of his yams and hire two men to build him two huts so he can have a house to go back to with his family. He also holds a great feast for his mother's kinsmen.

Returning from Mbanta, Okonkwo finds his village changed by the presence of the white men. After a convert commits the crime of unmasking an elder as he embodies an ancestral spirit of the clan, the village retaliates by destroying a local Christian church. In response, the District Commissioner representing the colonial government takes Okonkwo and several other native leaders prisoner pending payment of a fine of two hundred bags of cowries. Despite the District Commissioner's instructions to treat the leaders of Umuofia with respect, the native "court messengers" humiliates them, doing things such as shaving their heads and whipping them. As a result, the people of Umuofia finally gather for an uprising. Okonkwo, a warrior by nature and adamant about following Umuofian custom and tradition, despises any form of cowardice and advocates war against the white men.

When messengers of the white government try to stop the meeting, Okonkwo beheads one of them. Because the crowd allows the other messengers to escape and does not fight alongside Okonkwo, he realizes with despair that the people of Umuofia are not going to fight to protect themselves. When the District Commissioner, Gregory Irwin, comes to Okonkwo's house to take him to court, he finds that Okonkwo killed himself because he saw that he was fighting the battle alone and his tribe had given up. Among his own people, Okonkwo's actions have tarnished his reputation and status, as it is strictly against the teachings of the Igbo to commit suicide. Obierika struggles not to break down as he laments Okonkwo's death. As Irwin and his men prepare to bury Okonkwo, Irwin muses that Okonkwo's death will make an interesting chapter for his written book, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

Background

Achebe was born in 1930, in Ogidi, Anambra State, where Igbo-speaking people lived together in groups of independent villages ruled by titled elders. Within the forty years of the colonization of Nigeria, and by the time of his birth, the missionaries were already established.

Written in English, Achebe felt that the written standard Igbo language was stilted, which he connected to the fact that the standard was deliberately created by combining various dialects. In a 1994 interview with The Paris Review, Achebe said, "the novel form seems to go with the English language. There is a problem with the Igbo language. It suffers from a very serious inheritance which it received at the beginning of this century from the Anglican mission. They sent out a missionary by the name of Dennis. Archdeacon Dennis. He was a scholar. He had this notion that the Igbo language—which had very many different dialects—should somehow manufacture a uniform dialect that would be used in writing to avoid all these different dialects. Because the missionaries were powerful, what they wanted to do they did. This became the law. But the standard version cannot sing."

Achebe's choice to write in English has caused controversy. While both African and non-African critics agree that Achebe modelled Things Fall Apart on classic European literature, they disagree about whether his novel upholds a Western model, or, in fact, subverts or confronts it. Achebe continued to defend his decision: "English is something you spend your lifetime acquiring, so it would be foolish not to use it. Also, in the logic of colonization and decolonization it is actually a very powerful weapon in the fight to regain what was yours. English was the language of colonization itself. It is not simply something you use because you have it anyway."

Achebe is noted for his inclusion of and weaving in of proverbs from Igbo oral culture into his writing. This influence was explicitly referenced by Achebe in Things Fall Apart: "Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten."

Publication history

Achebe, who was assigned to his former duties in the Talks Department at NBS, had time to revisit and review his manuscript. He removed the second and third parts of the novel, leaving only the story of Okonkwo, the main character of the novel. He also restructured and added new chapters and paragraphs until 1957. After he has seen an advertisement in The Spectator, he sent the copies of his handwritten manuscripts to a typing agency in London by ordinary mail. The agency requested a fee of £22, which Achebe sent by British postal order. He heard nothing from the agency for many months. Towards the end of the year, Angela Beattie, about to relinquish her post as Head of Talks at NBS, was going to London for her annual leave, and Achebe asked her to check the status of his manuscript which he sent to the typing agency. Beattie's intervention forced the agency to retrieve the manuscripts already covered with dust in a corner of the office, and sent only one typed copy to Achebe in Lagos.

After becoming the Head of Talks, Achebe sent the typescript of the novel to the literary agent of Gilbert Phelps in 1958. Several publishing houses rejected the typescript with the reason that the fiction by African writers possess no financial potential. It was eventually taken to the office of William Heinemann, where it was presented to James Michie and through him, came to the attention of Alan Hill, a publishing advisor. Things Fall Apart was published in hardback on 17 June 1958 with around 2000 print copies. Although the publishers didn't reedit or copyedited the manuscript, it achived instant acclaim in the British Nation Press. The Times Literary Supplement said that the novel "genuinely succeeds in presenting tribal life from inside while patterns of feeling and attitudes of mind appear clothed in a distinctive African imagery, written neither up nor down." Time and Tide called it a fascinating story while The Observer praised it as an excellent novel which is "well worth reading."

Themes

Culture

Things Fall Apart depicts the cultural roots of the Igbos and refers them as a universal principle, which revives the lost dignity of the people during the Colonial Nigeria.

one general point...is fundamental and essential to the appreciation of African issues by Americans. Africans are people in the same way that Americans, Europeans, Asians, and others are people. Although the action of Things Fall Apart takes place in a setting with which most Americans are unfamiliar, the characters are nor-mal people and their events are real human events. The necessity even to say this is part of a burden imposed on us by the customary denigration of Africa in the popular imagination of the West.

— Chinua Achebe,

Historians focuses on past African Empires in order to improve the status of African history, but Achebe ignores the pattern by portraying Igbo people as isolated with an established tradition. He cleanses the picture of Africa in order to create a true meaning of the people's dignity. For example, when the missionaries enters Mbanta, they expects a king but seeing none, they set up their ruling system. In Things Fall Apart, there is a contradiction between different cultural practices; for example, the Europeans allow men to fight over religion but the Igbo tradition forbids the killing of each other.

Achebe presents some standard for the Igbo culture while not idealizing the past, like the troubling culture for modern democrats is the law that says Ikemefuna should be killed for the sins of his clans. Although Achebe shows the treachery, ignorance, and intolerance of the British, he doesn't present them as evil people. Instead he uses the both cultures—British and Igbo—to represent two mixture of human beings as seen in Okonkwo and Mr. Smith, who will not compromise when their cultures are threatened.

Reception

Things Fall Apart is regarded as a milestone in Anglophone African literature, and for the perception of African literature in the West. It is studied widely in Africa, Europe, India, and North America, where it has been the subject of secondary and tertiary analytical works. It has been translated to over 50 languages. Time listed the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka described Things Fall Apart as "the first novel in English which spoke from the interior of the African character, rather than portraying the African as an exotic, as the white man would see him." During the 60th anniversary of the novel, it was read at the South Bank Centre in London on 15 April 2018 by Femi Elufowoju Jr, Adesua Etomi, Lucian Msamati, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Chibundu Onuzo, Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, Ben Okri, and Margaret Busby.

On 5 November 2019 BBC News listed Things Fall Apart on its list of the 100 most influential novels.

Adaptations

A radio drama called Okonkwo was made of the novel in April 1961 by the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. It featured Wole Soyinka in a supporting role.

In 1970, the novel was made into a film starring Princess Elizabeth of Toro, Johnny Sekka and Orlando Martins by Francis Oladele and Wolf Schmidt, executive producers Hollywood lawyer Edward Mosk and his wife Fern, who wrote the screenplay. Directed by Jason Pohland.

In 1987, the book was made into a very successful miniseries directed by David Orere and broadcast on Nigerian television by the Nigerian Television Authority. It starred several established film actors, including Pete Edochie in the lead role of Okonkwo and Justus Esiri as Obierika, with Nkem Owoh and Sam Loco Efe in supporting roles.

In 1999, the American hip-hop band the Roots released their fourth studio album Things Fall Apart in reference to Achebe's novel.

In 1999, a theatrical production of Things Fall Apart adapted by Biyi Bandele was performed at the Kennedy Center.

In September 2024, a television adaptation was announced to be in development at A24 with Idris Elba set to star as well as act as executive producer alongside David Oyelowo.

Works cited

• Rhoads, Diana Akers (1993). "Culture in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart". African Studies Review. 36 (2): 61–72. doi:10.2307/524733. JSTOR 524733.
• Ezenwa-Ohaeto (1997). Chinua Achebe: A Biography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-33342-1. Archived from the original on 9 May 2021. Retrieved 21 March 2023.